Cash Country: A Revolutionary Biography of the Tunisian Dinar

Abstract

Cash Country is an ethnography of money in times of political upheavals. Following the 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia and across the Arab region, I investigate how Tunisia’s national currency, the dinar, has become a public object. From widely commented-upon devaluations, media scandals on disappearing banknotes, currency trafficking at borders, new practices of hoarding money, and changing monetary policies, I argue that the Tunisian dinar structures revolutionary aspirations and their disenchantments, tying political horizons to unchanging economic conditions. Cash Country devises a methodology to “follow the money”, centering its materiality and circulations. I track the struggles that invest the dinar’s material forms, from cash whose visual aspect strives to mirror the transition between political regimes, to attempts by financial actors to digitalize currency. I follow the dinar from inside the Central Bank, showing how the institution transforms into the mediator of financial capitalism at home, to the nation’s borders where the dinar’s illicit circulations run in friction with transnational surveillance regimes. Cash Country’s premise is the relation between money and its material forms, the exercise of materializing a universal media into a localized currency. I expand from the social theory of money which understands money as an object that evades definition because it exists mutually as a universal medium and a locally embedded form. I pay attention to social actors’ attempts to define money by bridging the gap between the idea of money – universal and commensurable – and its materialization into a national currency – depreciated and barely convertible. I argue that if the dinar has become a site of effervescence and interventions, it is because it articulates the scales people are caught in, between the frame of the national, where revolutionary transformations are imagined to take place, and the workings of global capitalism from where the imaginable gets produced. By following the social life of money, Cash Country writes a different story of uprisings and their afterlives in North Africa and the Middle East. Instead of assessing the successes or failures of revolutions, this dissertation highlights how struggles for freedom are struggles that invest the terms of capitalism. As political transitions give way to economic encroachment, Cash Country reveals how money operates as an object that structures horizons of possibility today.Middle Eastern Studies Committe